The New Yorker Festival 2017 Spotlight: Naomi Klein

The activist and author speaks to Jia Tolentino about Trump, centrist liberalism, and climate change.

After being repeatedly asked to “go on Chapo,” Naomi Klein, the author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” recently did just that. Will Menaker, one of the hosts of the popular, irreverent leftist podcast “Chapo Trap House,” began the interview with Klein by joking about a scenario in which Klein would come to his apartment to tape the show and find the hosts dressed in gleaming, head-to-toe Nike apparel. “That’s your fantasy?” Klein asked. “My fantasy was that I’d come in and you guys would all bend the knee.”

Klein was referring to a minor online scuffle that had resulted after Menaker said, in one of the podcast’s many diatribes against centrist liberalism, “You must bend the knee to us, not the other way around.” To some, the phrase sounded gendered—or at least corny. Klein, though, has a way of hitting a tone that feels plainly unimpeachable: her quick allusion was an expression of sympathy for “Chapo Trap House” and a teasing reproach to the hosts, too. She has been methodically dismantling centrist liberalism for a long time.

In Klein’s new book, “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need,” she makes a forceful and challenging case for political hopes and policy ambitions that go beyond liberal orthodoxy. The only pragmatic way to resist President Trump, she argues, is through radicalism. Climate change provides a lens for viewing the broader situation: “What mainstream liberals have been saying for decades is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But the challenge is much more fundamental than that.” Klein writes that to “admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the neoliberal project.” On October 7th, when I interview Klein at the New Yorker Festival, we’ll talk about whether that’s true for the Trump crisis, too.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” will be published in August.

Video

Protecting Culture in Trump’s America

In the first of an ongoing series of panel discussions called “Public Forum: A Well-Ordered Nation,” David Remnick speaks with Salman Rushdie, Tony Kushner, and Claudia Rankine about being guardians of culture in a new political era.

On October 8th, Barber, a central voice in progressive politics, will speak about reclaiming our values.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.